Isma'ili Modern

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256 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 6 illus., 1 map, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-7165-2
Published: January 2011
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-9945-8
Published: January 2011

Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

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Awards & distinctions

2013 Book Award in Citizenship Studies, Center for the Study of Citizenship, Wayne State University

The Isma'ili Muslims, a major sect of Shi'i Islam, form a community that is intriguing in its deterritorialized social organization. Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan regions of Tajikistan and Pakistan as well as in Europe, Jonah Steinberg investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the development of their remarkable and expansive twenty-first-century global structures.

Led by a charismatic European-based hereditary Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, global Isma'ili organizations make available an astonishing array of services--social, economic, political, and religious--to some three to five million subjects stretching from Afghanistan to England, from Pakistan to Tanzania. Steinberg argues that this intricate and highly integrated network enables a new kind of shared identity and citizenship, one that goes well beyond the sense of community maintained by other diasporic populations. Of note in this process is the rapid assimilation in the postcolonial period of once-isolated societies into the intensively centralized Isma'ili structure. Also remarkable is the Isma'ilis' self-presentation, contrary to common characterizations of Islam in the mass media, as a Muslim society that is broadly sympathetic to capitalist systems, opposed to fundamentalism, and distinctly modern in orientation. Steinberg's unique journey into remote mountain regions highlights today's rapidly shifting meanings of citizenship, faith, and identity and reveals their global scale.

About the Author

Jonah Steinberg is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont.
For more information about Jonah Steinberg, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

“Steinberg provides valuable insight into the dynamic complexity of identity, faith, and citizenship among one Muslim sect in today’s global world. Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.”--Choice

"[A] pioneering study."--Times Literary Supplement

"Steinberg expands his investigation to the very meaning of human sociopolitical organization, sovereignty, subjectivity, territoriality, citizenship, affiliation, and self-presentation in the transforming globalized sphere of human relations."--Middle East Journal

“A significant contribution to scholarship on Isma’ili Islam.”--MESA

"Steinberg demonstrates a strikingly thorough knowledge of Isma'ilism."--American Ethnologist

“With a strong theoretical base. . . Steinberg develops a nuanced portrait. . . . A well-researched and strongly theorized work.”--Contemporary Islam